Hartwell Grant Funds Ion-Channel Precision Therapy Research
Two university labs received $770,000 to match ion-channel disorder variants with existing or new treatments.
Updated on Nov. 5, 2026 in Biotech
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Pranam Chatterjee of the University of Pennsylvania and Roy Ben-Shalom of UC Davis Health received a $770,000 Biomedical Research Collaboration Award from the Hartwell Foundation. The two-year award targets precision therapies for disorders caused by genetic changes that affect ion channels.
Why it matters
Ion-channel disorders, called channelopathies, arise when genetic variants alter how these brain-cell pore proteins work. Only a small fraction of thousands of known variants have been studied in the laboratory, because each must first be measured over months of recordings.
The award totals $770,000 in direct costs over two years, while only a small fraction of thousands of known ion-channel variants have been studied by laboratory recordings. The predictive simulation approach has not yet been shown to match measured outcomes in the source material.
The players
Pranam Chatterjee
Chatterjee is an assistant professor of bioengineering and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Engineering, and previously won a 2022 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award.
Roy Ben-Shalom
Ben-Shalom is an assistant professor of neurology at UC Davis Health and a researcher with the UC Davis MIND Institute studying ion-channel disorders.
Hartwell Foundation
The Hartwell Foundation is a private philanthropic organization that funds biomedical research, including the collaboration award granted to these two labs.
The details
The labs will use simulations to predict how variants change channel measurements, then rank approved medications most likely to correct each variant. For variants that no existing drug fits, the teams plan to design new molecules, and Chatterjee's lab will build computational models of how mutations alter channel shape and gating.
Timeline
Chatterjee received a Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award in 2022.
The $770,000 collaboration award funds work over a two-year period.
Big Picture
The collaboration extends Chatterjee's 2022 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award into a joint project with Ben-Shalom's lab at UC Davis. Together the two labs are pursuing precision matching of ion-channel variants, a direction that builds on the Hartwell Foundation's prior support for individual investigators.
For patients with ion-channel disorders, this work points toward treatments matched to a specific genetic variant rather than to a general diagnosis. The timeline for any clinical availability is not specified in the source.
The takeaway
Precision medicine for rare genetic disorders depends on matching each variant to a treatment, and computational prediction may help clear the laboratory bottleneck. Readers should watch whether these simulation predictions are later confirmed in measured variant data.
Further reading
Explore more Biotech coverage for context on research funding and drug development.
Source note: This article includes information reported by The American Bazaar.
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